Making Time For Nutrition

In today’s busy world, it’s often difficult to find time both to exercise and to prepare healthy meals. For many people, it’s a question of choosing one or the other. But food that is cheap, fast, and convenient is often also unhealthy and can nullify your workouts. And if you take the time to carefully prepare a healthy meal after a long workday, you may not have enough time left for a workout. What to do? Fortunately, there are a few different options.

Some people find it helpful to do some extra work on Sunday to make sure that they’ve got healthy meals prepared for the rest of the week. Try buying bulk salad ingredients and throwing them together into five salads to eat for lunch during the work week. You can also do the same for dinner — whether you want to cook and then freeze entire meals or just cook a few basic ingredients to cut down on the prep time for dinner during the week, many people like to use their weekend to get a head start on meals for the rest of the week. And even if you don’t want to spend your weekend doing five days’ worth of cooking, you can still plan your meals for the week and go grocery shopping so that you can skip the time consuming deciding/planning/shopping process and jump right into the cooking during the week.

Another option is to always keep quick and easy healthy staples on hand so that you’ll always have the ingredients available to cook a healthy meal. Brown rice, quinoa, canned beans (rinse them to cut down on the sodium!), and frozen vegetables are all great options that pack a lot of nutrition into a short cooking time.